Why should raiding be exclusive?

Why do people feel raid content should be exclusive only to "good" players?

Why is it that if you want to go into an instance, fight a big boss that has mechanics, and want to work together with a larger group of people, you HAVE to put in 15 hours a week and be good at the game?

Why should the new boss models, the new instance architecture, the new art, all be exclusive to people that can put in X amount of time and put out X amount of DPS?

I don't really get why raiding, as an activity, needs to be exclusive. I mean, do we require everyone to be 100% physically fit to play any sort of football? We don't, so why should there be prerequisites for engaging in raiding as an activity? I don't see why Normals/Heroics should be the only difficulties of raiding.

I'm not saying that there should be un-exclusive modes of raiding (I know LFR and Flex exist), I'm asking why people think LFR and Flex should be removed, and that raiding should only be exclusive to "good" players

Some people may think so, but as a matter of fact, it is not exclusive anymore.

Whether that I good or bad I will not judge. Hell..I am fine with people calling it anything but raiding. A quick wing here and there suits me better these days than in fact spending 3 hrs a night on 3-4 days and I can live with it if these raids (in LFR) don't give pets, mounts, achieves and whatnot.

If it shuts the haters up, I could even live with it droping the same gear as it does now, but with blue text ^^

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

... there are lots of different types of players, with different amounts of time to play, and different tastes for the content and difficulty and time commitment they want to give to any of those pieces of content. The person that plays for an hour or so a few times a week is playing the same game as the person that plays five hours every night.....

Because its a team game, its not a solo act. If you play with people who are dependable, show up on time, learn the bossfights, try their very best to learn their class and how to play it. The game becomes more fun for someone who is doing the same.

Ive seen a lot of posts about why casuals are "shunned" etc, and i can not grasp why people do not get it.

If you are working, and one of the workers hardly shows up, and when he does he never does any work. How long do you think it will take before he is fired? And before you start arguing that "this is not work" its not about that. Its a social-structure and behaviorism. If you are playing with people you hardly know, until you do know them you wont accept them not doing their part for your mutual success.

Tbh i would love to have servers with a couple of extra choices.
Server choices like:
1. You want to be skilled and learn boss mechanics and take responsibility for your own actions so choose this one.
2. You dont care about who is good and not, just want to relax and have fun choose this one.

I can bet you that 9 times out of 10 even the casual player will take the 1st choice and here is where the problem lies. People instinctively want to be where they can play with as little fuzz as possible. Not everyone is wired that way but from what ive seen of this community a fair load of people are.

And too your football analogy. If you could hardly move cause of knee pains, you almost never show up to practice but always whine about never getting a spot in games, you still think its ok to let that player stay on the team? Effort = reward in my opinion.

I do understand that casual guilds shouldnt scream at or kick players that arent up to snuff. If you have a casual mindset you should let everyone play as much as possible. We currently have LFR/FLEX/NORMAL/HEROIC so there is plenty of room for anyone who wants to play. But since you are playing with others, you can not make up your own rules and think its ok to ignore what the rest of the group is saying too you. If 20 other or so people are telling you that your dps is too low, in my opinion you should try to improve. Im not saying you have climb mountains or become a pro but you should atleast try to improve. Same goes for not understanding boss mechanics and so on. Atleast thats who i feel.

lol I know, what I'm saying is loads of people are saying "get rid of LFR and Flex." And I'm questioning, why get rid of them? Why should Normal/Heroics be the only difficulties left?

I really don't think "lots" of people are saying that. If you enter any LFR and flex hate thread, first of all, it is ppl repeatingly visiting these threads and posting PLUS people disagree on this issue.

I am sure if I'd ask you to dig through the topics on these forums, you'd be hard pressed to find 100 INDIVIDUAL posters that demand to get rid of LFR. At the same time you will find at least the same amount of people who have no issue with LFR. And at the same time about a million or two (or more?) do LFR and flex every week.

Yes, I know the naysayers want us to believe that every single one of them doing it hates every single moment of it....

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

... there are lots of different types of players, with different amounts of time to play, and different tastes for the content and difficulty and time commitment they want to give to any of those pieces of content. The person that plays for an hour or so a few times a week is playing the same game as the person that plays five hours every night.....

It shouldn't especially not in it's current form. I can see a case for raiding being exclusive but it would look far different then it does today. It would be garbage that told no story, awarded no gear or character progression or mounts or achievements or anything at all except challenge oh and no catch up. In that case nobody would care or do it and then it could be exclusive as hell.

The hammer comes down:

Originally Posted by Osmeric

Normal should be reduced in difficulty. Heroic should be reduced in difficulty.
And the tiny fraction for whom heroic raids are currently well tuned? Too bad,so sad! With the arterial bleed of subs the fastest it's ever been, the vanity development that gives you guys your own content is no longer supportable.

Because its a team game, its not a solo act. If you play with people who are dependable, show up on time, learn the bossfights, try their very best to learn their class and how to play it. The game becomes more fun for someone who is doing the same.

Ive seen a lot of posts about why casuals are "shunned" etc, and i can not grasp why people do not get it.

If you are working, and one of the workers hardly shows up, and when he does he never does any work. How long do you think it will take before he is fired? And before you start arguing that "this is not work" its not about that. Its a social-structure and behaviorism. If you are playing with people you hardly know, until you do know them you wont accept them not doing their part for your mutual success.

Tbh i would love to have servers with a couple of extra choices.
Server choices like:
1. You want to be skilled and learn boss mechanics and take responsibility for your own actions so choose this one.
2. You dont care about who is good and not, just want to relax and have fun choose this one.

I can bet you that 9 times out of 10 even the casual player will take the 1st choice and here is where the problem lies. People instinctively want to be where they can play with as little fuzz as possible. Not everyone is wired that way but from what ive seen of this community a fair load of people are.

And too your football analogy. If you could hardly move cause of knee pains, you almost never show up to practice but always whine about never getting a spot in games, you still think its ok to let that player stay on the team? Effort = reward in my opinion.

I do understand that casual guilds shouldnt scream at or kick players that arent up to snuff. If you have a casual mindset you should let everyone play as much as possible. We currently have LFR/FLEX/NORMAL/HEROIC so there is plenty of room for anyone who wants to play. But since you are playing with others, you can not make up your own rules and think its ok to ignore what the rest of the group is saying too you. If 20 other or so people are telling you that your dps is too low, in my opinion you should try to improve. Im not saying you have climb mountains or become a pro but you should atleast try to improve. Same goes for not understanding boss mechanics and so on. Atleast thats who i feel.

You're acting as if every casual raider is trying to leech off a Normal/Heroic raiding guild and ask to be carried.

Ideally what would happen is LFR is tuned to be easy enough that you HAVE a group entirely of casual players that don't really care about being the best, yet they can still complete it. And not aiming to be the best is completely fine: some people truly play games to have fun and not worry about things like rotations and stuff like that. I minmax my WoW character and do pretty good DPS, yet in some other games, I completely ignore what's the "best" and play what's fun.

Running as an activity is not exclusive, still competitions can be and are arranged for those who want to do it seriously.

The reason people are calling for the abolishment of LFR imo is that it needs to be dumbed down to the point of pointlessness, since you can't presuppose any level of organization. There is no working together in LFR, which obviously exists in organized groups, and is essentially the point of MMOs. You could reproduce the LFR experience with AI bots with 5 lines of code.

..and anything after this can be applied to any part of the game. By your logic, let us start right at the beginning and make all quests group quest. Plus: No content ever becomes soloable, 5 mans and old raids scale up. If you missed out on Thunderfury in Classic? Tough luck better find 39 others if you wanna go there again.

Want a Raven Lord? No soloing Settek Halls for you. Etc.

I think that worked awesomely for the Final fantasy game(s) that tried it

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

... there are lots of different types of players, with different amounts of time to play, and different tastes for the content and difficulty and time commitment they want to give to any of those pieces of content. The person that plays for an hour or so a few times a week is playing the same game as the person that plays five hours every night.....

I really don't think "lots" of people are saying that. If you enter any LFR and flex hate thread, first of all, it is ppl repeatingly visiting these threads and posting PLUS people disagree on this issue.

I am sure if I'd ask you to dig through the topics on these forums, you'd be hard pressed to find 100 INDIVIDUAL posters that demand to get rid of LFR. At the same time you will find at least the same amount of people who have no issue with LFR. And at the same time about a million or two (or more?) do LFR and flex every week.

Yes, I know the naysayers want us to believe that every single one of them doing it hates every single moment of it....

Eh, I could probably find that number, especially if you put me on the official forums.

But, even if it IS a vocal minority (I believe it's definitely a minority) I still want to see why they think it should be like that and why they're so vocal about it.

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Originally Posted by boccko

Running as an activity is not exclusive, still competitions can be and are arranged for those who want to do it seriously.

The reason people are calling for the abolishment of LFR imo is that it needs to be dumbed down to the point of pointlessness, since you can't presuppose any level of organization. There is no working together in LFR, which obviously exists in organized groups, and is essentially the point of MMOs. You could reproduce the LFR experience with AI bots with 5 lines of code.

And I don't see the problem with that, really. There's peewee football for 7-year olds that doesn't follow the strategy of the pro level, yet that is still allowed to exist. If you're a beginner at an instrument, there's very simply pieces you can play that don't take into account any higher understanding of music, yet those exist. They're "dumbed down" (or, just made easier) but I don't see how that means they're pointless

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Originally Posted by det

..and anything after this can be applied to any part of the game. By your logic, let us start right at the beginning and make all quests group quest. Plus: No content ever becomes soloable, 5 mans and old raids scale up. If you missed out on Thunderfury in Classic? Tough luck better find 39 others if you wanna go there again.

Want a Raven Lord? No soloing Settek Halls for you. Etc.

I think that worked awesomely for the Final fantasy game(s) that tried it

But what's the problem here ? They add lfr and flex, it's not rquire so much time and effort to complete. It is targeted for casual players. Also fun factor is different for everybody. For example i got fun in everything if i do it right, also improve myself is fun part for me Oh and that football example is not good. Sure everybody play football but only players who really "care" and spent their entire life got most profit for it (champions league,millions of $$ etc..).

It never was.
They should rename lfr in afk now or something. I rarely read serious complaints about flex though. This seems like just another one of those dumb ass topics to cry about pseudo elitists.

Why do people feel raid content should be exclusive only to "good" players?

Because there really is no real incentive for being a good player outside of good peformance, which at this point with this playerbase feels like welfare to carry less then good players through dungeons which are already nerfed heavily over the course of time. Challenge wise, Heroic Dungeons were once what Heroic Raids are today.

Why is it that if you want to go into an instance, fight a big boss that has mechanics, and want to work together with a larger group of people, you HAVE to put in 15 hours a week and be good at the game?

Because if a MMO is subscription based then it would be in creators best interest to put in as much hours into the game as humanly possible.

Why should the new boss models, the new instance architecture, the new art, all be exclusive to people that can put in X amount of time and put out X amount of DPS?

Because it then forces those sub-par people to improve which would benefit everyone who parties with them outside of that new instance architecture.

I don't really get why raiding, as an activity, needs to be exclusive. I mean, do we require everyone to be 100% physically fit to play any sort of football? We don't, so why should there be prerequisites for engaging in raiding as an activity? I don't see why Normals/Heroics should be the only difficulties of raiding.

They arent. We have flex, LFR, Youtube videos as a source of experience as well. The issues is when we have low peformance amateurs getting near same attention and rewards as those who put it to a much higher level. It's less of a issue where 100% physically fit to play any sort of football dont get to experience football but less then 10% physically fit to play any sort of football get near same reward as those who would be an equivalent of those 100% physically fit to play any sort of football.

TL: DR
It feels like you're being cheated out when you are exceptional above the crowd but only get a recolored armor that still blends in the crowd of brown-ness.

What line of reasoning ? Raiding normal modes isn't even exclusive. At least not for what you call good players. The only thing required is putting in a minimum of social interaction and actually pushing some buttons.

Why is there a new topic on these matters every day?
We get it, you're not very good at playing this game + you don't have much time to spend playing it or improving yourself + you cba finding a raiding guild that suits your needs.

OR, You may just not want to, and some of the fun you get from this game is by running nerfed to the ground content with a bunch of strangers, which we ALL know you do strictly for LOOT and not for any other reason (if you wanted to see the contet you'd just run it once, wouldn't u ? )
Although there's no sense of progress in LFR, I can't imagine why you'd need these epics for anything.... to progress on what ? nvm... I guess big numbers on items are sufficient progress.

You want somebody's acknowledgment for playing LFR? well, you don't need it, it's there, it's gonna stay.
You can do w/e you like with it, personally, me and others find it boring, mind numbing and not worth the boredom and torture to gear our alts..
Do I have a problem with you playing it? no... feel free to play LFR, just stop, please, stop talking about it like it's a challenge of any sort.

Because there really is no real incentive for being a good player outside of good peformance, which at this point with this playerbase feels like welfare to carry less then good players through dungeons which are already nerfed heavily over the course of time. Challenge wise, Heroic Dungeons were once what Heroic Raids are today.

Except doing the content, feeling accomplished about it...but also getting the exclusive titles and mounts or whatever. And exclusive phases/bosses/achievements

Because if a MMO is subscription based then it would be in creators best interest to put in as much hours into the game as humanly possible.

Or it's in their best interest to provide content to all audiences, instead of saying "if you can't meet these prerequisites, unsubscribe."

Because it then forces those sub-par people to improve which would benefit everyone who parties with them outside of that new instance architecture.

To an extent, but not everyone plays the game for the same reason, and if everyone does the content for which they're matched for, there is no crossover of "bad" players playing with "good" players.

They arent. We have flex, LFR, Youtube videos as a source of experience as well. The issues is when we have low peformance amateurs getting near same attention and rewards as those who put it to a much higher level. It's less of a issue where 100% physically fit to play any sort of football dont get to experience football but less then 10% physically fit to play any sort of football get near same reward as those who would be an equivalent of those 100% physically fit to play any sort of football.

But there are rewards that people get for Normal/Heroic completion. I'd argue that "low-performance amateurs" AREN'T getting the same amount of attention, from Blizz OR from the WoW audience. People know Method and Blood Legion, not "random LFR raider #2540." Blizz still makes content exclusive to higher difficulties, despite the fact that LESS people do that harder content, AND those hardcore players aren't missing any content.

TL: DR
It feels like you're being cheated out when you are exceptional above the crowd but only get a recolored armor that still blends in the crowd of brown-ness.

You could easily say transmog ruined that feeling

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Originally Posted by cFortyfive

What line of reasoning ? Raiding normal modes isn't even exclusive. At least not for what you call good players. The only thing required is putting in a minimum of social interaction and actually pushing some buttons.

I don't know their line of reasoning, hence the topic asking them what it is.

I want to see why so many people seem to think "if you can't put in the time to raid Normals/Heroics, you shouldn't be able to see the raid content." They apparently want raids to be exclusive to those who can commit X number of hours to the game a week and pull X amount of DPS, and if you don't meet that requirement, you shouldn't be able to see the raid.

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Originally Posted by Falu

Why is there a new topic on these matters every day?
We get it, you're not very good at playing this game + you don't have much time to spend playing it or improving yourself + you cba finding a raiding guild that suits your time.

You want somebody's acknowledgment for playing LFR? well, you don't need it, it's there, it's gonna stay, do w/e you like with it, personally, me and others find it boring, mind numbling and not worth the boredom and torture to gear our alts..
Do I have a problem with you playing it? no... feel free to play LFR, just stop, please, stop talking about it like it's a challenge of any sort.

Funny, because I'm actually a 25man normal mode raid leader who doesn't run LFR at all.